Khaz notation

The khazes (singular khaz) are the signs in which medieval Armenian church music was written down. They are neumes, which mark the direction of a melody and the manner of singing it, not exact pitches, and they were used with the eight modes of the Church’s hymn system.¹

The books

The oldest dated hymnal was copied in Jerusalem in 1193, and the oldest talaran, a hymn book, was drawn up in 1241 at Drazark in Cilician Armenia.¹ The priest Khachatur of Taron is credited with introducing the signs and with arranging the Sharakan, the Church’s collection of hymns, in this notation.¹ The earliest sharakans date from the fifth century, and the hymns of Nerses Shnorhali, Catholicos of Cilicia from 1166 to 1173, were later added to the collection.² A manuscript copied at Aghtamar in 1430 has khaz notation for the katsurds, a kind of hymn that went out of use after the first centuries of Armenian hymn composition.²

The loss and the work of recovery

The last Armenian kingdom, Cilician Armenia, fell in 1375. The people were scattered, monasteries were devastated, manuscripts were destroyed, and the oral teaching and any manual of the notation were lost. Singers stopped reading the signs and sang ornate variants of the melodies instead.¹ Scribes went on copying the signs for centuries.²

Komitas was the only researcher of his time who studied the medieval khazes. He counted 198 kinds, and in 1910 he wrote that he would soon solve the problem, but his research was lost when he was deported in 1915.¹²

In the early nineteenth century the priest and musician Hambardzum Limonjian of Constantinople (1768–1839) devised a new notation that approximates the old melodies in a system close to European staff notation. With Minas Puzhushgian he created the Limonjian system, which preserved a large part of the sacred repertoire.¹